Cryptocurrency & Blockchain - A Theoretical Lens on Financial Disruption

Most essays on crypto end up as either uncritical enthusiasm or blanket scepticism. I wanted to use established economic theory to actually understand what was happening.

What I did: applied three theoretical frameworks - Schumpeter's creative destruction, Marx's accumulation and crisis theory, and Weeks's transformation of social relations - to analyse what blockchain actually does to the existing financial order. Choosing a theoretical lens first and testing it against evidence produces a much more rigorous argument than the reverse.

What I discovered: context matters enormously. Bitcoin and Ethereum didn't emerge randomly - they emerged in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 GFC, at peak institutional distrust. DeFi Summer 2017 demonstrated what happens when you remove financial intermediaries entirely: unprecedented accessibility alongside unprecedented risk. Neither "crypto is revolutionary" nor "crypto is a scam" captures that duality.

The Marx lens was the most uncomfortable and the most revealing: despite its decentralisation rhetoric, crypto has reproduced many of the same wealth concentrations it claimed to solve. Early adopters, miners, and protocol founders captured disproportionate value. The technology disrupted the form of financial intermediation without disrupting the underlying power dynamics.

Knowledge gained: the vocabulary of DeFi is different from traditional finance. The analytical framework isn't. Financial professionals who dismiss crypto as outside their domain are ignoring a structural shift in how value is created, stored, and transferred.